…but I’m shaking things up a bit.
Short Version:
The site design is in transition. The layout you see is more or less what the new layout is going to be, but it’ll take me some time to put in all the really useful navigation bits and also to adjust the color scheme, though I did kludge around with the background color to make it resemble the old layout to save me from responding to everyone who took the almost-black-on-glaring-white as a design choice rather than an unadjusted default. Yes, the floating islands of whiteness that remain are ugly. They aren’t staying, but the rest of today is for writing, not CSS and HTML tweaking. I don’t really think anyone’s going to complain about that.
Update: Saturday
No sense making a separate post for this…
As those who follow my Livejournal and Facebook sort of know (and there’ll be more info about that in the coming week), I took some big steps to get my non-professional life in order this past week, with the intended goal of getting my professional life (that is, writing) back on track. That’s gone well… better than I expected… but we’re not seeing the fruit of it just yet.
While being too frazzled to write, I got a lot of stuff that’s not writing done, and some half done, like updating the site’s look. Yesterday I got 2,000 great words that don’t quite fit together right. I think they’ll turn into an actual chapter on Monday. The part of my brain that’s working right now is the part that halfway understands techy stuff. So, I think the most productive thing to do is finish what I started on the site. Anybody who’s really interested in watching me fumble around with HTML in public view can watch the process and leave comments as things develop, but anybody who’s just looking for story should come back Monday. It’ll be a good chapter… it’s almost there now.
A Note On Width:
This is from my reply to a comment below. I’m reproducing it here because I suspect it will answer a lot of peoples’ questions/concerns:
I’m trying to hit a balance on the width… I don’t want it to use up all available space on a widescreen monitor, because having just looked at the site on a widescreen monitor for the first time recently I find that leads to a lot of annoying tracking side-to-side while reading. But I don’t want to waste space on a netbook. This layout is set to use a fixed width for both columns. My goal is to make it stretch out to a certain maximum width but no further, so if somebody has a giant widescreen monitor they will still have some gutters on the sides but the content will fill a reasonable-sized column, and it will still fit comfortably in a netbook. I have an idea how to do that, but since I fiddle with CSS about once a year I’m having to relearn a lot. For now, I’ve adjusted the fixed widths a bit to reclaim more space for content from the sidebar.
Update: Sunday
Okay, the width seems to be working and now navigation is coming in. There are still some elements (the navigation links included) where the backgrounds don’t match up, because they were made for the default color scheme. Unless major problems crop up I’m done messing with code until next weekend, but I’ll leave this post up and visible for feedback and error reporting. You folks have been great about letting me know when one of the changes broke it for you. Thanks a lot for the help!
Update: Monday
I’m seriously open to suggestions for what color to make links in the body of the story to have them show up against the background and be obviously links even if they’re in the middle of the text. Should I just give in and make it underline them so that color contrast is less important?
Also, I’ve taken the step of temporarily hiding some of the more distracting/cluttered elements using CSS. Depending on your system you might see things blipping in and out of existence when the page first loads. That’s a temporary state of affairs until I decide what to do with them, long term.
I like the look, maybe a touch up on the color of the font on the background b/c it’s marginally hard to read, but it’s overall nice.
Hi, love the new site layout- but would it be possible to get it with a pastel(ish) background similar to the previous background colours? Just makes it so much more relaxing on the eyes while reading.
I’m thinking much the same thing. I like the cleaner layout, I don’t like black on white.
The mellow, old parchment-y tan was nice. The red stands out nicely, but I wouldn’t want to read too of it at once.
I liked the parchmenty color, too, but I found that people’s reactions (or maybe how it showed up on their screen) varied too much for it to make a good web theme. Interestingly I had people describing it as everything from cream to bright orange.
Theres more space for adverts then story…
The margins will be wide if you have a wide monitor, as this theme doesn’t stretch to fill all available space. It looks perfect on my netbook, good on my regular width monitor, and kind of odd on my widescreen one though I have a feeling I’ll get used to it. If you’re seeing a lot of white space, don’t worry, it’s not “for adverts”. Right now only 25% of the ads that were on the old layout are even present, and that’s because they’re pre-paid. I’m mulling some ideas for an ad-free or at least greatly-reduced ad site, though I’d still like to have some space where other creators can flog their efforts.
I actually kind of dig some of the ads. They always seemed appropriate to the readership expected to see them, anyway.
As I have some optical difficulties, I must say that although I like the new layout ok, the background is now white to me, and that always kind of smarts. It could be worse, though. Do you know how many people online seem to think red on blue is a good idea?!
Yeah, I like having an outlet for other creators, but I want to try to do it with fewer ads. I’m not sure how to do that and keep it affordable/accessible (having more ad spaces keeps the price per individual ad down and lets more people show off their stuff), especially as I was dissatisfied with how many weight loss scams and other things got through.
I’d rather have black-on-white than GRAY-on-white, which is what it currently is.
I liked the blue look, actually – blue is a soothing color, and it was light enough not to impede reading. The text was just a bit larger, too, which really makes a difference for me.
You can increase the font size manually by pressing option+ (or I think apple+ on a Mac).
I love the new layout. I enjoy the slightly gray background. Then again I spend so much time in front of a monitor I am just grateful whenever a background color is not white, or at least not something bright. i also like that the stories are not as wide, given the fixed width of their div/section on the screen, It is actually much easier to read, the lines do not get too long and are much closer to a length that people comfortable read in books.
As for the ads, they have never bothered me, I was always up for the Author getting whatever money she can to help offset the costs of hosting and to have enough money to be able to devote time to writing.
Love the site and love the stories!
Hi. In the interests of constructive criticism of the new site, one of the weaknesses of the old one was navigation. The categories are largely defunct as the backlog of chapters has far exceeded the original 5 books. I think it would be better to have a link to a looooong page with a single line link to each chapter in order from newest to oldest and continue to have links to your other works so that people can hop between them easily (also free advertising for you between site to site).
I personally like the colour scheme and the front page look, I just think the navigation is somewhat lacking still is all. Hope that is useful rather than demoralising after working on it :/
Not demoralizing at all, and also far from off-base about the old layout or the current state of the new one. “Please pardon my dust” is my way of saying it’s a work in progress. Changing the theme is the easy part. Customizing it for usefulness is going to take a little bit more work.
GAH! White background hurts the eyes, grey text isn’t easy to read, and the ads that use to run down the side of the page? Those are now the MIDDLE OF MY SCREEN! 5 inches of my 13 inch wide screen is used by the story, making it seem VERY narrow. The news/character info is in it’s own area next to the ads, instead of above now. This will be very hard to read if it stays like this for very long.
When I first hopped on, it was too wide to read comfortably. I ‘zoomed out,’ though and it looks fine. So, I’m not sure if it was the layout, or I was zoomed in. When I’m reading online for any length of time I always have to increase the font sizing, and sometimes that setting will stay through a closeout and reboot and sometimes it won’t. I haven’t figured out what makes the difference.
None of the other pages I visited today were strangely and startlingly large, though, for what that’s worth.
Interesting! Can you tell me anything about your set-up? (What kind of machine you’re on, browser)?
I’m on a Toshiba of some sort (all right, all right, I was just being lazy with that.. I do know where to look – it’s a Toshiba Satellite L505D). 16” screen
I browse with Firefox and let it update when it tells me it wants to. – Side note – The zoomy feature with Firefox is the only zoomy feature I’ve found useful. Awesome having everything go big instead of just the words that I was used to with Explorer. /Side note
I zoom and un-zoom as needed (like I said, lengthy readings, pages with default teensy font, startlingly large pages) and have not found out why sometimes the zoom is still in effect the next time I load up. It’s pretty rare to go in cold to a site that’s too wide for my screen, though. I remember having to scroll sideways all the time on the old desktop and aol’s browser..
Hope that helps a bit.
wow….I did not know about zooming. this is great!!
I don’t get it, how am I sposed to check the status of more tale sof mu and void dogs. change is bad. Uphold the status quot.
-I’m not Magellan I don’t navigate.
Navigation links will be added before that becomes an issue.
One issue is that the next/previous post links are now below the comments, not the story. Kinda a pain to have to scroll all the way down rather than just clicking once you finish reading the current post.
I would have to agree that the pastels worked. easy on the eyes and actualy comforting if you choose the correct colors. one option to try might be dark grey on black. i know it’s morbid, but after looking at black on white all day, it seems to at least make my eyes hurt less.
as for the layout, it’s not bad, but i would suggest stacking the second and third columns. have twitter and the character links on top of the adds. the width is fine, but i think that having the story on one side and everything else crammed in as little space as possible is more of an eyesore.
to be honest, i liked it better before. with my screen resolution (1600×1200) the story takes up about 1/3 of the page. that means there is a whole lot of itty-bitty text against a huge mass of really bright background. trying to read it like this is really going to hurt my eyes. way back on your old star harbor nights site, you were using white text on a black background. i really liked it, it’s soooo much easier to read. and, when you have white text on black, the text even looks bigger, which also helps. i’d really hate to have to stop reading because it hurts too much to look at the page. also, i really liked having links to not only your other stories, but also your blog all up near the top. it would be nice if those came back, and if you added a link to your fantasy in miniature. i also agree that it would be nice if your next/previous links were where between your story and the comments, and maybe right above the story too.
At first glance I like the character tag cloud. I’d be in favor of a little subtle color, but I see there’s already a sort-of discussion going on so I’ll leave that to the rest of you. The bar at the top looks spiffy – just a little bit of detail but not too distracting.
It’s kind of interesting…I found this much easier to read than the old colors, because the text on my monitor is nigh-black and the background is light enough grey to contrast, but dark enough to be gentler than white. The old background was a pretty bright yellow on both my desktop and laptop monitors.
Yay! The wordpress standard comment system is so much nicer, especially for those of us who sometimes surf with JavaScript turned off. I can read the comments reliably, now! Big win! Not that it was a huge issue for me until recently; I discovered the story about two weeks ago, and have just now finally caught up to the present time. So I probably would have avoided the comments anyway, in case of spoilers.
Any chance that we could get a link to your old Micro Horror stories when all the other linkage is done? I miss those
Here it is for now. Mmm, the blurb at the top is out of date. I’ll stick that somewhere in my to-do list, but now that I’ve cleared out the comment queue it’s time for writing.
I think this looks cool, though if it were possible to add the MU emblem that was on the front page before into the grey backgrounds, instead of whatever crest is in there, that would be pretty cool too.
I agree! That’s one of the reasons I picked this layout, it has a fairly easy way of customizing the header. I’ll be playing with that when I have time to mess with the layout in earnest.
Definitely need to get some colors back in here. And I agree about the back and next links needing to be above the comments. I usually don’t bother with the comments so I’d rather not be forced to scroll over them and have them nip at my attention. And I’m not really sure what the griping about navigation in the old layout is about. I never found it difficult to navigate. One question though, are all the urls the same? That might be a dumb question, but I believe I have the very first installment of the story linked on my blog and if I need to change it I’d like to know.
Yes, all the URLs are the same. I’m very careful about preserving the validity of links.
I agree with the “more time writing stories”, but the thirty seconds it took switching the theme and five minutes I spent slightly adjusting the link colors wouldn’t have produced much more than this comment.
I may sound like a broken record here but this black on white is too extreme to be reading anything more than a few paragraphs. It is particularly the white background that needs to be smoother. I did like the tan parchment before, but since you had troubles with it maybe the blue option someone mentioned. I don’t care what you choose actually as long as it’s not so bright. Thank you.
PS I do like the new layout, it looks much more professional than before.
“Professional” is exactly what I like about this one, other than the fact that it’s—in theory—very versatile and easy to customize. The background color will definitely be changing.
Honestly, I liked the old style better, too.
The bright white background and pale grey text makes it painful to try to read now. It may be more professional-looking, but it’s giving me a pounding headache just looking at it. Even with zooming in, the grey on white is very hard to read.
Also, with a wide-screen monitor, the stories are now a tiny third of the middle of the screen, with a lot of glaring white-space at the sides. This means a whole lot more scrolling to read than the old style had. Hassle = less inclination to read.
Just my two cents.
…
When you come back later and the color scheme is different, pat yourself on the back for having changed my mind.
Ahhhh. Thank you. Much less painful.
The subtle floral swirls in the background on some sections are a nice touch. Not sure if they were there before or not, but kudos.
I didn’t have a problem with the old layout, and the parchment colour worked vary well on my system. Unfortunately, colour matching across systems requires, if not specialist knowledge, at least special attention to each system. You can only do what you can. In my experience, earth-coloured backgrounds are easiest on the eye. Pale lemon yellow might colour match better, as might light stone or sandstone. Blue tends to be a bit cold and antiseptic.
Enough about form – on to the function. The main questions on my mind are whether there will still be a LiveJournal discussion page for each chapter, running in parallel with the default inline comments, and, considering that the default inline comments system had to be taken out of service because it was causing problems, how long it will be before those problems manifest again. Personally, I favour picking just the one comments system and sticking to it.
One board to do us all,
One place to find us,
One space to pitch our scrawl,
And in discussion bind us,
On the site of MU where the stories lie.
Wordpress has come a long way since I first disabled the default comment system.
Love the color scheme, which has changed a bit since I looked a couple of hours ago.
I agree – the very minor tweaking of color since my first comment really made an astounding difference!
*Snerk* Change is good for you, MF. I liked the old layout, but it’s nice to come to a fresh, new site once in a while. It’s nice knowing that the person running the site not only cares about the content, but the look and feel of the site as well. And vice versa, of course, of course.
Sometimes, while my brain is feeding on the nourishment of a good read, my eyes need some tasty candy to stay focused. This is why layout, color choices and font sizes are important on a website.
To those complaining about adverts– if you’re not donating to help cover the cost of site hosting, you need to keep your mouth shut.
I was a fan of the parchment-y thing myself, because I thought it really kind of matched the almost old-fashioned feel the MU-universe carries, but the subtle floral prints look very nice, and they’re easy on the eye. I think it’ll be a smooth transition for your readership.
Every time I change the layout, it somehow makes people suddenly notice the ads… even if there’s suddenly less advertisements.
This time, it’s probably because they are sitting closer to the center of the screen than before. And I’d like to thank you for choosing the less annoying ads, by the way. It makes it a lot easier to read the story when the ads around it aren’t flashing, yelling at you, growing to cover the screen, or moving constantly. Really appreciate the simplicity of the ads here. Thank you!
Dude, I even CLICK the ads! Except for one frequent one where the guy in it looks like someone I can’t stand. I’m crazy, know. But I am in favor of tasteful ads because when we can’t donate, at least there’s that. Also- I dig the tag cloud thing.
I think if it stays with the story taking up less than half the width of the page I’m just going to stop coming. I used to contribute and look forward to coming to ToMU but it’s so sporadic now that I forget it exists and now that it’s a pain to read, I doubt I’ll bother.
I love the background color. Its very soothing and much easier to read that the white was. The large (huge) empty space on both sides of the text is a bit annoying, but not something that would stop me from reading.
Just a few (I hope positive) thoughts: I’m on a netbook now and the text is taking up a little more than half the screen, but from other people’s comments it takes up much less at higher resolutions. Does the text/story have to be the part with a set width instead of the adds? I’ve seen one other site that is like that and it bugs me, I still go to that one, and I don’t intend to stop visiting yours, but it is frustrating.
I’ll also just throw my vote in that high contrast between text and background is good for reading clarity, but I enjoyed the tinted background color before, which to me was almost green! I definitely think you’re on the right track there. Good luck, I wouldn’t want to be wrestling with css/html myself.
I’m trying to hit a balance on the width… I don’t want it to use up all available space on a widescreen monitor, because having just looked at the site on a widescreen monitor for the first time recently I find that leads to a lot of annoying tracking side-to-side while reading. But I don’t want to waste space on a netbook. This layout is set to use a fixed width for both columns. My goal is to make it stretch out to a certain maximum width but no further, so if somebody has a giant widescreen monitor they will still have some gutters on the sides but the content will fill a reasonable-sized column, and it will still fit comfortably in a netbook. I have an idea how to do that, but since I fiddle with CSS about once a year I’m having to relearn a lot. For now, I’ve adjusted the fixed widths a bit to reclaim more space for content from the sidebar.
I don’t know what changes you’ve made since your last post, but right now the content more or less fills the screen on my 13″ MacBook, and displays with wider left/right margins on my 20″ cinema display, so I guess it worked.
Is the acanthus leaf(?) texture in the header repeatable? The hard edge where it meets the solid grey beside it looks a bit strange atm.
Thanks for telling me! I’ve checked it out on every monitor and resolution setting available to me, but the more people telling me it works on their set-up the better I feel about it.
You’re right about the texture at the top. I don’t think it repeats well but one thing I found when messing with width is that it stretches pretty nicely. Making it fill the width of the screen without stretching the content containers below is going to be one of the cosmetic tweaks I do once I’ve got everything else right.
Hey – the new layout looks nice, but I don’t like one important thing about it: going through the archives. If I want to browse, say, “Other stories,” I don’t really like that you have to click on the name, so that it “unfolds,” then either click continued or click the name again to see the story. I kept accidently hitting the wrong thing. A direct link would be a bit more… direct, and it would be nice to be able to scan down the list to look for all the Two stories (or whatever). I also agree with the comment that there should be links at the top AND bottom of the story to the next page! I DO really like the list of characters on the side, though.
Good point… that unfolding is the default behavior, which I think is based on the idea that there are going to be short blog posts there, not whole stories that have a “read more”-style cut. There’s a setting to turn it off, though. Now that I’ve got the width doing more or less what I want, improving navigation is my next goal.
It looks really nice right now, the text fills up a good portion of the screen again even on my wide-screen monitor.
The color’s nice and readable as well, although I can’t even remember what it looked like before, nor way back when I started reading in some distant past.
Anyway, I hope that you’re feeling better and here’s to more omnomnom reading material in the future!
Dunno if anyone elsse has pointed this out yet – on my netbook the ads/twitter/etc are way down the bottom on the main page
Can you tell me your resolution? Edit: I just tried it on my Netbook with the resolution turned down to 800×600 and saw the same thing. I’ve fixed it by giving up a tiny bit of width on the content box… you’ll have to scroll over to see the whole sidebar but you should be able to read the story normally. I assume people with that resolution are going to be a minority. There’s still quite a noticeable gutter between the sidebar and the content at that resolution… if I can figure out what’s causing it I should be able to widen it a bit.
I like the new width.
One thing that’s bugging me is that your Twitterbox is now down “below the fold”, instead of right there in the top corner where I can look to see if there’s a new update somewhere. It’s gotten to be automatic to glance up there first, and nothing’s there! It took me a while even to notice it down below.
Good point. I’ll rearrange the box to put it at the top of its column, and add looking for a more prominent place for it to my ultimate to-do list.
I have a 23″ monitor, and I find this layout a little difficult as it is all on the far left of the screen. I’d really like it if everything was nice and centered, but I’ll live if it stays the way it is now.
It is incredible how much better the site looks when you display:none the sidebar and change the max width of the content to 100%. Take that how you will.
I’d imagine that’s more true on a netbook than on a 1600 pixel monitor, but maybe your neck is in more need of exercise than mine.
I don’t know if you’re already sick of hearing comments about the new design, but I’m hoping you can stand one more…
I have to admit I found the new layout a little… alarming. My first impression was that I was getting hit with so many different boxes and content areas packed into the initial screen that I couldn’t figure out where I was supposed to look. I think I may have actually physically recoiled from the monitor, and it took me a minute to find the actual story (well, all right, probably more like a few seconds than an actual minute, but longer than it should have).
There’s a book on web usability out there called “Don’t Make Me Think”, and while thinking is generally a good thing in most other cases, it really is true that with web design, it’s best if the viewer’s eye is automatically routed to the main content, the navigation is clearly identifiable and located somewhere where you’d expect to find it, etc., so that the viewer doesn’t have to stop and think “Wait… what am I supposed to be looking at here? And how am I supposed to find it?”
I can appreciate the changes you’re trying to make, but right now it looks really, really busy and cluttered, especially up near the top of the page. Part of the problem, I think, is that most of the boxes have very little padding, so the content is jammed right up to the borders, which definitely gives it a more claustrophobic feel. A lot of the text also seems unnecessarily large – I know people often tend to equate text size with readability, but while there’s some truth to that (at least insofar as teeny-tiny text is hard to read), text can often be made easier to read by making it a little smaller, but increasing the line spacing and adding a bit more padding and margin and what not to visually separate different elements. Most of these are pretty easy tweaks to make with CSS…
Also, considering the length of most of the pages, I don’t think the double sidebar really makes much sense. All it does is crowd the top while leaving a ton of whitespace the rest of the way down the page. I think most of the pages are long enough that all the sidebar content could be placed in a single column down the page. If a double sidebar is really necessary for some reason, it usually works better visually, I find, to put sidebars on either side of the main content instead of clustering them together on one side. I know the two-sidebars-on-one-side thing is currently popular in some blogging platforms, but from a design standpoint it’s kind of a nightmare.
Sorry to sound negative – I’m actually intending this as constructive criticism, but it’s always hard to tell if things will come across as intended or not. I do web design as my full-time job, so once I get started talking about it, it’s hard to make myself shut up.
Some of this helps me crystallize what I don’t like about the masthead and the sidebar, though to a large degree those things are only because I haven’t given them as much attention as I did the main content area… making sure the story was readable before today was my highest priority.
But I’m really finding some of it iffy. Forgive my untrained ignorance, but isn’t taking a single double-columned sidebar that holds most everything of interest/use on the page that isn’t story and splitting into two sidebars separated by the width of the page exactly the sort of thing that Don’t Make Me Think would be warning against? Likewise with making the bar narrower and more scrolly… I fail to see the advantage for the page’s user in making them look all over to find the link/feed they’re looking for.
The more space an object takes up, the more likely the eye is to be drawn to it. Or at least, my eye. I’m on a widescreen Mac but my windows are sized to relatively standard resolution. Since both the stories *and* the links/advertisements on the page have a loooooot of text, it’s hard to tell which I should be focusing on. Essentially, it’s a busy layout, even though the advert text is a smaller size, and I’m having to “think” more to figure out what it is that’s relevant to my interest in the page.
By making the bars more narrow & scrolly/splitting them up, you center the text of your stories, giving them more space in a sense and also making it clear that the stories are the important thing (like center stage is the most important spot on stage). Additionally, for me, the proportions of sidebar-to-main-content are really visually unappealing. They don’t split evenly into halves, or two-thirds-story-one-third-adverts or three-fourths-story-one-fourth adverts. That just makes it really messy looking. I’m not trying to be judgmental or anything, but personal opinion.
That makes some sense in that I can now understand where you (and the person above you) are coming from, but I’m not sure how universal it is. I think the trend towards narrower content boxes as screen increases is a good indicator of where most people are on this issue, and I think there’s good reasons to prefer a narrower content box.
I decided to do this after comparing Kate Harding’s blog to Fred Clark’s… they’re both perfectly readable on my netbook, but ever since I got a bigger monitor on my compy I can’t stand tracking sentences across the width of the page on Fred’s.
I’ve already made a couple of tweaks to the sidebar to make it stand out less, but I don’t think I really want the content to stand out more because that tends to be synonymous with hard-to-look-at. Given how close the two blocks can come on some monitors, I think it’s important that they have a visual separator, but maybe a vertical line would be better than a full border framing the sidebar.
…
Also, this is not directed exclusively at you but I’m a little weirded out that the sidebar is being seen as “advert” space… even when it only had one adblock in the furthest column. I suppose you could call the Twitter and the feeds “ads” for myself, but they’re there because people wanted them.
When I started this redesign I left the Project Wonderful ads off and I was about 75% sure I was going to leave them off as a show that I trusted the readership to support my work without so many ads (this was spurred by a conversation with a reader who’d specifically offered money if I’d drop the ads), but one of the very first comments I got was about how much ad space there was. That just made me feel like people who don’t like ads aren’t going to be satisfied with reduced ads, so why bother?
(Though there is still one fewer large ad space on this page than there was.)
Hmmm. I think I was referring to the two sidebars as advert space because those are the most prominent feature there (being very brightly colored and all). I’ve never really minded ads because I know they’re a necessary evil of running a webcomic or serial novel (in most cases). I’m thinking that it might be seen less as ‘advert’ space if you keep the Twitter, and the tag cloud, and the various RSS feed links in one column, and just put the ads all together in the other column. Yes, it’s more typical, but I think maybe that’s how like internet users like their pr0n — er, their daily/weekly material?
I’ll be honest, I almost never notice the ads on this site. Once in a while one will catch my eye, but it’s more to do with it being something I might be interested in rather than something that was just too flashy or irritating to ignore.
A comment on the ‘ad’ space on the side/story placement/column width from someone with *no* web design background or knowledge, but spends ridiculous amounts of time looking at web pages: It works for me as-is, and I have hard time seeing the issue.
Anything I’d be looking for non-story wise is right there where I’d like it to be – the first place I’d look on any web page for links to other works/places of interest is up top and to my right. The first place I look for actual content is center page, under a header/page navigation. The story being aligned to the far left works for me, because, shock of shocks! that’s how I read..left to right.
The story takes up a slight bit more than two thirds of my screen, which I’m ok with, and you’d have to seriously mess with more than column width and some colors to get me to stop reading.
Thanks for the specific feedback; I think a lot of times people are more apt to speak up about what doesn’t work or is a problem for them.
I’m going to chime in on the didn’t care about ads before, still don’t care about them side. It’s just that when you move something, people notice that you’ve moved it – everyone will start tuning them out again soon, I’ll bet.
I do believe you’re right, because I’m recalling the same thing happening the last time I redesigned the site. Each new iteration has had fewer ads than the one before, funnily enough.
“Happy customers don’t call your boss.” It’s proven time and again in retail and food service..I’d never thought to apply it to an internet-based venture, but…
People should be told when they’re doing a good job. AE..you’re doing a good job, I thinks. Not everyone is concerned with what looks good to *others* when it comes to *their* site. It’s nice to see someone take the feedback and critiques into serious consideration – as a reader, thank you.
Thanks for saying so! I don’t always take advice well, but that’s one of the things I’m working on.
For body link color, I think instead of underlining them, which might be taken to be textual emphasis, you should just color them dark green. It would be different enough from the black that they would stand out, but similar enough that it wouldn’t jar the eye or stop the flow of the paragraph.
I don’t know why, but I find this font and this width, together, quite hard to read. It may have something to do with the content of the most recent chapter, but I found myself skipping over 3/4 of it. Any paragraph that was more than three lines, essentially, got skimmed or skipped.
I’m not sold on this font, either.
Funny – the exact same thing happened to me. It didn’t occur to me until just now that it might be the font or something. Usually I read every chapter thoroughly, even the introspective ones. I, too, found my eyes just skimming over any paragraph longer than three lines.
So far I think I’ve had exactly one person say they like this font better, so I’ll probably dig the previous one out.
Well, obviously that has my vote =)
The other thing, and I’m not sure how much water this theory really holds, is that it might be the spacing between the actual lines. I’m trying to remember what made the previous version easily readable, and unfortunately it’s so hard to pick out just one bit, y’know? I think it’s a bit like Jenga – if you pull out one thing, sometimes the structure holds, but pull out the wrong one, and the whole thing falls. But you can’t just blame that last one, because if the previous ones hadn’t been removed, that one wouldn’t have mattered.
And that last bit isn’t meant as a criticism or a critique or anything, just my mind wandering.
This font works just fine- entirely legible, and easy to read even from a few feet away on a high resolution.
The font looks like a basic sans-serif to me (probably helvetica, but I don’t have enough training in typography to tell for sure)…is it supposed to be something else? I think this typeface works fine, but a slight increase in leading might help with the readability.
I really dislike the font, honestly. I don’t find it visually appealing at all… and the spacing makes it a bit hard to read. I preferred having a font that had smaller lowercase letters, relative to the height of the font, and the greater spacing between lines…
It’s amazing what a difference the font makes! I like this current one (is this what you were using before? I can’t tell for sure) and I like that there is a little more spacing between the lines. For me, this font actually adds to the feel of the story.
Yeah, this is the same one, though there is more spacing between the lines now than there was before.
I’m probably a bit out of date on the discussion so this may have been covered, but one thing I’ve noticed on every visit since the changes started… The last character (or two) of every line is hidden under a vertical scroll bar. It’s like the window width is set, but then the scroll bar is added making the auto-sizing just that bit too wide. Does that make any sense?
For info: 19″ monitor at 1280×1024 & using IE6.0.